Thanksgiving

All of the MCC foreigner got together on Friday for a day of cooking and eating to celebrate Thanksgiving. Robin did the shopping in Dhaka, Ethel brought pumpkin pie, Jerry carved the duck, Phil brought the ducks and salad on his motorcycle (live ducks), Rebecca cut up lots of salad, Eva (Salt coordinator visiting from Akron) dictated how to kill the ducks and made special duck organ soup, and Cecily did most of the cooking. The food was amazing - we never get this kind of food and salad is rare as raw vegetables aren't safe to eat. The only mishap was that the caramelized almonds for the salad were set in the sink under a lot of dirty dishes. They got a little wet and dirty, but as we are all used to eating dirty food we simply washed them and re-toasted them. I also forgot that I had feta cheese in the fridge at the office. So I rode a rickshaw (wearing jeans and a t-shirt) through a huge crowd of Saddam Hossain protester/men leaving Friday prayers in their panjabis and toupis. Besides the duck we had stuffing, gravy, foccacia bread, fruit jello, homemade applesauce, apple pie, pumpkin pie, soup, chocolate chip cookies (Eva brought us chocolate chips), huge salad, cranberry drink, and lots of coffee. After eating we sat around eating pie and singing from the Mennonite hymnal in the darkness of the two hour power outage. All the neighbors listened and wondered what those songs were. My kitchen was unrecognizably filthy until my cook came on Saturday, but my mind is full of good memories.